


Apple Cake (and other remedies for an ailing soul)

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, M/M, Vignettes, gross misuse of apples, soft emotional landings, soft-core food porn, we're up all night to find bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-28
Updated: 2014-04-28
Packaged: 2018-01-21 02:49:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1534829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is something that’s mentioned in the Smithsonian exhibit, for reasons that Steve cannot actually parse. He is an American Hero (so they say) who saved New York (more than once), and under all that information on one of the see-through plastic descriptions of his heroic deeds is, for some unintelligible reason, the sentence, “he currently resides in the D.C. Metro area, and his favorite food is apple cake.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apple Cake (and other remedies for an ailing soul)

**Author's Note:**

> This is not the fic I set out to write, but it's the fic I ended up writing anyway. Probably because I'm a moron.

It begins so innocuously: with apple cake.

It is something that’s mentioned in the Smithsonian exhibit, for reasons that Steve cannot actually parse. He is an American Hero (so they say) who saved New York (more than once), and under all that information on one of the see-through plastic descriptions of his heroic deeds is, for some unintelligible reason, the sentence, “he currently resides in the D.C. Metro area, and his favorite food is apple cake.”

None of that is technically untrue, although Steve argues the _American Hero_ portion of the exhibit, but that’s like arguing about the cake when the real issue is the decorations on the frosting. And speaking of cake, there it is, like every single Sunday morning, sitting on top of his mailbox when he’s done with his run: an apple cake.

Natasha offered to wire the place up with some cameras so Steve could find the mysterious purveyor of cake, but even before the whole S.H.I.E.L.D is HYDRA debacle, Steve was never comfortable with that. And now, after? He’s even more uncomfortable with it, but it doesn’t matter because Natasha is into the wind and Sam, while infinitely more technologically savvy than Steve, isn’t about to start wiring cameras. 

“Damn,” Sam says, though, when he sees the box sitting on top of the mailbox, the ribbon around it the usual red and blue star-spangled number, Steve’s name carefully printed on the top, “who’s it from?”

“I don’t know,” Steve admits, picking it up and tucking it in his arm as they go up the stairs to Steve’s apartment. It’s neater than usual because he’s boxing everything up, packing everything up. He’s been asked (because no one wants to subpoena a national hero) to speak to Congress about his actions, but he’s refused (twice) and it’s been sitting a little uneasy with him. Part of him feels responsible, not for the destruction of the building and the undoubtedly very expensive weapons systems, but more for the jobs lost. 

So the cake, the last one, because next week he’ll be on the road with Sam, looking for Bucky, is more reassuring than he would probably like to admit. It’s nice that his mystery admirer, at least, hasn’t lost faith in him. 

“Are you sure it’s not poisoned?” Sam asks, looking at the box.

Steve shrugs and undoes the ribbon. “I don’t know. Howard suspected that I would metabolize any poison in my system before it could kill me, so it might well be,” he says, and now he’s kind of annoyed he hadn’t thought of that before, but back in 1943, if a mystery admirer sent you a box with a cake in it, it was usually from a girl who had spent all her week’s ration of sugar to make it and so poisoning wasn’t really something he had to worry about.

Also if a cake showed up mysteriously at the door, it was probably for Bucky.

“But I don’t think so,” Steve finally says, taking two plates down from his set and setting them on the table. “Do you want a piece?”

“You know that there’s an urban myth about razor blades in apples?” Sam says, but he’s grinning and going for a knife to slice it up. “When I was a kid, on Halloween, it was always _don’t take anything that isn’t sealed, it could be poisoned or have a razor blade in it_ when we went trick-or-treating.”

“We didn’t do trick-or-treating when I was growing up,” Steve says, and pours a couple of cups of coffee from his coffeemaker – it’s not fresh but it’s still good and Steve doesn’t like to waste – and sets them down. “First time it happened here, I had to run out for candy after giving the first kids that showed up at my door dimes.” He got dirty looks for that one, and he still finds it unsettlingly offensive that dimes aren’t considered a lot of money anymore. 

“Did they egg your apartment?”

“Only once,” Steve finally manages to say, sitting and taking a bite of apple cake. "Bucky would have loved that part of Halloween," he adds, taking another one, and tries not to think about Bucky and Halloween, making a mess on Devil's Night like it was his only job, the once-a-year free for all riot of pranks and mischief. They would have been great teenagers, with all the free time kids have now, he thinks. Well. Bucky would have. 

~~~~~~

They don’t think about it much, after that. They’re leaving on Friday, and so Steve sets a note out for his anonymous cake-baking benefactor, thanking her (and he pictures his upstairs neighbor in Brooklyn, Mrs. Kessel, every single time – older, with a boy off in the military, and Steve as a stand-in for her baking needs) for all the cake.

They’re on the road for three months. None of it is easy going, and Steve can’t thank Sam enough for being there. It’s an odd feeling, realizing how lonely he was, because he knew it on an intellectual level, but it wasn’t easy to express. Sam makes everything brighter, in a way that reminds Steve a little of Bucky, back before the war, only less of a jerk, but that’s okay, too. It’s impossible to replicate Bucky: he was (is) one of a kind, the kind of friend you find and keep and hold onto for your whole life long. 

They’re in a diner in Dutch Pennsylvania when Steve’s heart closes up at the same time he takes a bite of an apple dumpling that tastes so close to the apple cake that Bucky’s mom used to make whenever he got sick that it literally takes Steve right back to 1934. “Bucky’s mom was really worried I was going to die,” he says, staring at the dumpling that’s slowly melting into the ice cream underneath it. Sam was checking his phone for something, but that kind of declarative statement, apparently, is something that you look up for. “She would tell my mom that I was the only good influence in her no-good kid’s life, and that she was worried I was going to die.”

Sam looks really serious, for a moment. “But you didn’t die.”

“1934 was the coldest winter I remember,” he says, simply. Sure there was the Polar Vortex up in the Midwest this past year, but Steve was already in D.C. and the weather there didn’t compare to 1934. “The Depression made it even worse. Bucky had already dropped out of school, and he was working to make extra money for just the necessities. And there was this night, and I thought that it was it, I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t stay warm. He showed up in the middle of the night, stinking like work, and he sneaked in through the fire escape and kept me warm. All night long. Next morning his mom sent over an apple cake.” It’s hard to express why this was so important. It seems stupid, now, he thinks, with modern medicine and modern housing and modern everything. “Turns out that there had been a fight outside of Bucky’s work that night, but he had left early and stayed out of it. Said if it hadn’t been for me, he would have come home with another split lip.”

It's funny for a moment. Sam stares at him for a long, long time, as if he's trying to figure something out, and Steve's worried he said something wrong. But then the moment is over. “From what I heard, you came home more bloody than he did,” Sam states, and Steve is surprised until he remembers that he and Bucky did that propaganda video where Bucky is laughing and smiling and telling some stupid story about how Steve couldn’t keep away from a fight, that he didn’t have the sense that God gave squirrels, and Steve is laughing at the same time because it was all so _funny_. Everyone in America’s seen that stupid video, that last public moment between them, the last smile that Steve remembers Bucky giving, because he can watch it again and again.

He stares down at the apple dumpling, and he pushes it away a little. “Let’s go.”

~~~~~

They’re in Boston Sam gets violent food poisoning, the kind of food poisoning that is more embarrassing than it is anything else, and he locks the door to his motel room and tells Steve to “go do something and come back in eight hours,” so Steve goes for a walk. He only gets stopped once, by a girl who is giggling and blushing and it makes Steve uncomfortable, until finally she works up the nerve to ask for a picture with him. He gives her a look, and she just blushes more, and finally he can’t take it anymore. She takes the picture and promises not to put it on her Facebook, and he thanks her for that.

He orders apple pie, this time, at a tiny diner owned by a squabbling Chinese couple who clearly have no idea who he is, or if they do, they don’t care. 

The pie is good – not great, not excellent, but decent, and Steve is enjoying the silence more than anything when he looks up and he swears he sees Dugan ordering a burger at the bar.

It’s surreal. He keeps staring, because Bucky coming back from the dead has suspended his disbelief about a lot of things, but he’s pretty sure that this isn’t Dugan, that he's hallucinating. He sits there, holding a forkful of pie halfway up to his mouth and the man turns, and looks at Steve. “Captain America?” he says, and his grin in blinding and _Dugan_ , “well I’ll be damned.”

“Uh,” Steve manages, flabbergasted. 

The man sits across from him, holding a hand out. “My grandfather was Timothy Dugan, he served with you, right?”

Steve sets the forkful of pie down and shakes the man’s hand. “Did someone tell you I was here,” Steve manages, before his manners take over. “Steve Rogers, it’s good to know that Dum- _Dugan_ had a family after the war.”

The man laughs. “Timothy Stephens,” he says, introducing himself. “Gramps used to talk about you like you were made of gold. I’m sorry he wasn’t around when you were found. He would have had a lot to say about it.”

“I imagine it would have started with _about damned time, Rogers_ and _the world is going to pieces_ ,” he says, finally managing a smile. It’s the first time he’s managed it with someone who isn’t Sam, since Natasha left, and it feels remarkably good. 

Stephens laughs again and the sound is jarringly familiar, achingly comforting. “Sounds about right,” he says. “I reckon without you he wouldn’t have made it home. Seems to me I owe you a thanks.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Steve says, and the pleasure he feels is honest. “Tell me about your grandfather, instead.”

Stephens gives a chuckle. “He used to talk about all the Commandos, really, but he liked talking about you and Barnes the best. Said you abused each other so much everyone thought that if he didn’t make you smile like he was reciting the word of God that they would have thought that you hated each other.”

Steve remembers that abuse. It was just how they talked to each other – teasing and epithets, smacking at each other when they could, like even that touch was better than nothing. Steve halts that thought before it finishes. It was just how they were. Brooklyn boys to the very end. Brooklyn boys to the heart of it. “We were old friends,” he finally manages, as if that explains everything, when it probably doesn’t explain anything at all.

“Gramps never quite put it that way,” the other man begins, but he doesn’t clarify what he means, either. They eat and they talk and for a moment Steve thinks if he stands up and walks out of the diner he’ll open the door to a bombed-out shell of London, and doesn’t dread the idea.

~~~~

They don’t catch up with Bucky until they get to New York. They should have started there, really, Steve thinks in hindsight. Doctor Banner lets them stay at his apartment in Queens, which he keeps because apparently staying in Stark’s tower seems to give Tony the impression that he’s on call, and he wants to retain some sense of independence. “Also, I don’t like the noise level in Manhattan,” he admits.

Sam just gives him a look - _I’m a Harlem boy_ he tells him, and Banner apologizes, profusely, until Steve puts a stop to both behaviors – but they set out, and it’s almost three in the morning when Steve is in Brooklyn, hanging on the rooftops, that he spots him.

He forgets Sam, then. He forgets everything. Brooklyn has changed and it hasn’t; the facades are different but the buildings are mostly the same, and Steve _knows them_. But there’s no advantage here, skimming over buildings and then into the streets, because Bucky knows them too, they grew up here, this was their playground. He runs for an hour. He runs and keeps running.

Catch up with isn’t what happens. 

What happens is that Bucky runs until he’s on the roof of a building where if he jumps off, he’ll fall into the river, and Steve is just behind him, when Steve is _pelted_ by something.

It’s hard and round and hits him square in the temple, making a _splat_ noise before it falls to the ground. Steve looks up and Bucky is aiming another one – he always has had perfect aim – and it hits him on the chest this time. _Splat._

He raises his fingers to his temple and wet comes away, but it’s cold, and when he touches his fingers to his lips it’s sweet and –

 _Apples_?

“You jerk!” he yells out into the night, “Are you kidding me?”

He gets brained by another apple, and he can hear Bucky’s voice in his head – not this Bucky, throwing apples at him and fleeing like a thief into the night – say, _some Super-Soldier you are._

Steve picks up an apple and takes a bite, and it tastes like regret, bitterness, and Granny Smith.

~~~~~

All this really does is lead them back to the start of all of Steve’s apple-related woes: Washington D.C. Sam needs to take care of some things at the VA and Steve goes to sit at the Smithsonian and brood a bit. He’s sitting there, alone, when an old woman – about Peggy’s age, so about his real age – sits down next to him, setting her cane down next to him.

She’s tiny, and he feels disproportionately enormous next to her, larger than he usually feels, which isn’t actually that large. In his head he’s still that little guy, and every day he’s still sort of shocked when he’s looking down at the people in the world instead of up.

“You’re him, aren’t you?”

He looks over at her and it takes a moment. “Yes ma’am,” he says, politely, because his mother raised him right. 

She looks up at him and sighs. “I remember you when I was still taller than you, Steve Rogers.”

He looks down at her again, his eyes wide. “I’m sorry?” he says, because he knows some people who remember him, but most of them are veterans, and they talk to him like equals, not like they’re slightly exasperated to see him. But no one who knew him enough to say _when I was taller than you_.

“Oh, I came around, once or twice, usually for Bucky. He was trouble, but so handsome,” he says, and Steve feels the tips of his ears burn suddenly, embarrassed and jealous all at once, like it’s 1940 all over again and he has to see Bucky step out with yet another girl. “And you would look at me just like you’re looking at me now, and he would take me dancing and talk about you the entire time.” She sighs.

Steve winces.

But then she goes on. “I don’t know why you two didn’t just kiss and get it over with. If you heard it from him, you were the bees knees, and the sun shone when you spoke. There are some things you forget, but not something like that.” She pauses. “Oh, well. Different times. One of my great-granddaughters, she has a cute little girlfriend, a tiny slip of a thing, and frankly, I approve, even if my boneheaded son thinks that they’re going to go to hell.”

Steve is feeling not only exposed, but incredibly embarrassed, because everything she’s saying is true. “I’m happy for your great-granddaughter,” he finally says, and it comes out a little strangled.

“Seventy years and you still have no idea how to talk to women,” she says, tapping his shoe with her cane, and smiling up at him. “I hope you liked the cake.”

He takes a moment, and then he lets out a breath, and it comes out more like a sigh of relief. “That was you?”

“I thought, after stealing your man, it was the least I could do,” she tells him. “Now, are you going to walk me to my taxi?”

Steve does, then, and it’s slow going, and before she gets in she makes him bend nearly double to kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you for your service, Steve,” she says, and squeezes his hand, her fingers so frail that he’s afraid they’ll snap against his wrist.

“You’re welcome,” he says back, smiling down at her. She gets in the taxi and drives away.

Steve finds a box of apple cake in his hotel room the next day.


End file.
